'Rosewood' Book Comes Out

November 16, 1996|By Dianne Copelon, Sentinel Correspondent

Film fans will have to wait several more months to see the Warner Bros. Rosewood movie. But a paperback version of the story with photographs taken on the film set will be available this week in bookstores across the country.

Warner Bros., which shot the film earlier this year in east Lake County, joined forces with Michael D'Orso, author of Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood, to produce a movie tie-in book called Rosewood.

The new edition includes D'Orso's complete text of Like Judgment Day, plus an introduction on the making of the film by director John Singleton. Illustrations of costume sketches of the main characters in the film are plentiful, as are photos of the set, taken on location near Cassia.

D'Orso's book, released by G.P. Putnam Books last February, was often seen on the set during the January-April shoot. Crew members were seen reading it between scenes.

But when he researched and wrote his text, D'Orso had no tie-in to the film; nor did the film researchers or the script writer make contact with him. Each party searched for the Rosewood survivors and their descendants and conducted their own interviews.

When D'Orso tried to visit the set last winter, he was politely refused entrance until Singleton invited him for a chat inside his private van parked nearby. D'Orso was told that Warner Bros. planned to issue its own book on the making of the film.

In the meantime, plans changed and the film company made a Hollywood deal with the book company. The paperback is released by Boulevard Books, a division of the Putnam/Berkley Group. In Like Judgment Day, the author tells the story of the massacre and its aftermath. The film relates only the week of terror that ended with the burning of Rosewood. The Hollywood touch also puts a love story and a fictional character into the script.

In his text, Singleton tells of his meeting with Minnie Lee Langley and a few of the original survivors of the Rosewood massacre in 1923.

''Talking to them was an experience I will never forget,'' Singleton wrote. ''I got an eerie feeling that the voices of their ancestors were pushing through these survivors, letting me know that as a black man with opportunity, it was my duty to tell what had happened to them.''

Born and raised on the West Coast, Singleton said Rosewood was the first picture he had ever made outside of Los Angeles and ''out of his element.'' It was also his first location film, and he describes living in Florida (near Lake Mary) for the eight months of film preparation and shooting.

Singleton said he and the producers visited the original site of Rosewood, near Cedar Key. But the trailer camp residents living there resented their presence, fearing that the black families granted reparations from the Florida State Legislature would come back to reclaim their land.

Warner Bros., according to Singleton, considered renting property in Seminole Woods to build the sets depicting the towns of Rosewood and Sumner.

''But two murders that had been committed there the year before gave us pause,'' he wrote. The film company settled on land in Royals Trails, a few miles east of the Seminole Woods ranch.

Singleton also describes how he motivated the cast with improvisational exercises days before the shooting began and how he chose Wynton Marsalis to write the musical score.

But Marsalis, although still listed in the production credits on the back cover of the new book, is not doing the score after all. He reportedly backed out of the project a few months ago because of schedule conflicts, and the job was given to John Williams of E.T. and Schindler's List film score fame.

And that may be one of the reasons for the delay in releasing the film, originally expected in theaters before the end of December.

Grace Ressler, publicist for Warner Bros., said earlier this week that a final editing cut on the film was scheduled to be delivered to the studio by Jan. 31.

''We're looking at February or March for a release date, but nothing is settled,'' she added.

Moviegoers in Winter Park and Tampa have reported seeing a trailer for Rosewood previewing the movie as a coming attraction.